What is the name of the poem John Keats wrote to a singing bird?

The poem John Keats wrote to a singing bird is “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Keats wrote the poem in 1819, during one of the most productive periods of his short literary career. It is one of his major 1819 odes and was inspired by the song of a nightingale heard near the house he shared with his friend Charles Armitage Brown in Hampstead, London. Brown later recalled that Keats composed the poem beneath a plum tree, possibly in a single morning.

The poem has eight stanzas of ten lines each and explores the contrast between the nightingale’s seemingly timeless song and the human experience of suffering, aging, and death. The speaker longs to escape into the bird’s world through imagination, but the vision eventually fades, leaving him uncertain whether the experience was real or a dream.

The title is sometimes confused with Keats’s other famous odes, especially “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “To Autumn.” “Ode to a Nightingale” was first published in July 1819 and later appeared in Keats’s 1820 collection of poems.